GameSessions Blog

First Build of the Challenge! Team Guinea Pig…

For the first build of the challenge we decided to build a machine for the non-technical person as part of the Cheapest Gaming PC Challenge, so we picked an off-the-shelf PC and added some minor upgrades to see if it would play the most demanding of recent PC game releases.

These are the components we used for the first build of the challenge:

Did it go as planned?

The graphics card was purchased at a later date as we quickly realised that the machine’s integrated graphics card couldn’t handle the more demanding games. We were advised by a competing colleague that the GDDR5 was better than the GDDR3 because the GDDR5 carries double the bandwidth of GDDR3 at the same clock frequency – in short GDDR5 is better for transferring larger amounts of data (which the more demanding games may require).

Will it run the games?

We reckon that this machine should be able to cope with most games with the settings ramped down – e.g. medium to low detail, lower resolutions. But the more graphically demanding games are likely to push this machine to its limit.

But is it the cheapest?

In terms of being the cheapest, although our machine had respectable specifications and already had input devices and OS pre-installed, it is likely that the more technically-minded teams will be able to source more powerful and cheaper components than our off-the-shelf tower.